


Watching the World

by secretagentfan



Category: No. 6 (Anime & Manga), No. 6 - All Media Types, No. 6 - Asano Atsuko
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 02:24:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9153397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/secretagentfan/pseuds/secretagentfan
Summary: "Safu tells him she wants his sperm for a baby, and after she successfully manages to pry her own foot out of her mouth—Shion runs off."Safu's life.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be for Safu's birthday a million years ago but obviously it ran away from me.  
> Covers some events in Beyond.
> 
> Thanks Megucahomo for editing this.

She is 1.

            Her parents are dead, but that’s okay because she likes her grandmother. She also likes the fact she has toes _,_ and that she is capable of touching these toes if she rocks on her back and raises her feet in the air. She does so. Frequently. 

Concepts like time and consciousness are foreign to her. She screams often and isn’t entirely sure why she feels compelled to do such a thing, but the world is big and bright and that is reason enough to continue yelling at it.

            Her grandmother waits in line with her wiggly pink body, and hands her off to a nurse to be tested. She passes the infant examination with flying colors, moving up in the ranks as many do: without realizing they exist.

Safu is 5. 

            Safu is Safu. Safu is a name. Safu is a person. Safu likes sweaters. Safu likes math and words and science. Safu likes No.6, and how her number sounds on her ID card. Safu likes a lot of things—many things— all at once, and has yet to find a single thing she does _not_ like. Therefore, she assumes, she must like _everything_.

Safu is 7.

            “I don’t like people.”

            Her grandmother laughs, looking up from her knitting. “What brought this on, now?”

            “People.”

            “…This is about your classmates, isn’t it?”

            “No. Yes. No.”

            “Yes?”

            “No.”

            “What do you mean, dear?”

            “I like you.”

            “Thank you, dear, I like you too—“

            “But not them.”

            “Oh. Well, I think you should take the time to get to know some more people before you judge all of them. Everyone here in Chronos is so kind, and thoughtful—“

            “And dumb.”

            “Safu. What did we say about that word?”

            “Not nice.”

            “What brought this on, now?" 

            “A boy gave me his jacket today.”

            “That sounds like a nice thing to do.”

            “He said my sweater was going to make me cold—“ 

            “Well, he does make a point, it isn’t made out of any special fibers, I could—“

            “I don’t want it like that! I like it like this! I like feeling warm like _this_. Not like that.”

            “Well, I don’t think I see anything wrong with—“

            “ _He_ saw something wrong with it.”

            “…”

            “He did! He’s wrong.”

            “Sometimes people are just that way, and you just have to keep trying, dear. You just have to keep trying, even when it’s hard.”

            “Why?”

            “Because that’s just what you do.”

Safu is 8.

         She finds the words “shy” and “quiet” whispered behind her back. She is neither of those things, but she allows it. Less people bother her, and that fits her better than a temperature-regulated jacket ever could. 

Safu is 9.

         He talks to her. Doesn’t give her any choice, really. He simply walks up to her desk after class, and slams a conversation right at her feet with the tact of a flash bulb to the face. He babbles on about the warmth of her sweater and his opinion on pink and purple color-combinations, and then turns on his heel and dashes out of the classroom with enough enthusiasm to raise the sun. Safu blinks.

         Only later, when she’s folding her sweater to change into her comfiest pajamas, does she realize that she was generally _interested_ in what this Shion was saying before he scurried off. It was certainly nothing she’d been told before.

He’s different.

         The following day, when he slides into the desk beside her with a curt, _hello_ , Safu finds herself pushing aside her schoolbag to make room.

Safu is 10.

          She wears her best dress to test day. Skirts are cuter; but this dress has _long sleeves,_ which are rare during the summer because other students are weak and still obsessed with fabric heat. Safu isn’t though, and her _long sleeves_ make her feel like the coolest, cutest ten-year old in the lab.

          The city calls it a lab, but it hardly counts as one, considering it’s essentially just an oversized classroom used for medical and academic examinations. There’s a small area sectioned off by sound-proof glass that’s dedicated to infant examinations; parents with babies wait their turn in line patiently— or impatiently, it’s quite tough to tell with the sound-proof glass. Safu shifts past them for her interview.

          She’s confident that her dress isn’t the only thing making her massively capable, because one of the men she’s going to be interviewed by is inadvertently showing off all of her immaculate test results on the projection screen shining up out of his watch. It’s an accident, of course; one-way projections are expensive, and he has apparently jumped to the completely incorrect conclusion that Safu, at age ten, cannot read backwards.

          Before her interview, she’s led past the row of children still working on written exams to the vaccination station. She hasn’t had to stop here for years but a new mandatory vaccination has been released, and Safu just barely falls within the age limit. Tears prick her eyes with each punch of the vaccination stamp.

A couple men in lab coats take her fingerprints and they make idle conversation.

          “Where are your parents?” The shorter man asks.

          “Gone.” Safu replies. “I live with my grandmother.”

          “We’re terribly sorry for your loss,” announces the first man. He wears the longer lab coat, and Safu’s heart pinches at his lack of sincerity.

 _Just be honest with me,_ she thinks. _It’s better that way._

          Something instinctual speaks in Safu’s head. _They never are,_ it whispers in a voice older than anything Safu has ever heard. 

 _Who?_ Safu asks, but receives no reply. 

          “Well that’s all for now.”

          “We’ll meet again Safu. Stay healthy,” the man in the long lab coat announces before turning his back.

Safu smiles over the strange heaviness in her stomach.

         _They never are,_ buzzes in her head one more time, but she silences the doubt; best not to look like it matters at the interview.

Safu is 11.

         She throws one of her boots at a student. He gets a bloody nose but Safu figures if it teaches him that passive-aggressive remarks about her clothing, hair, and existence are not going to be tolerated— she can afford some moral sacrifices.

         Frankly, she _hates_ him. She hates stupid people but not as much as she hates herself lately, and her face, and her chin, and how her eyes look in the mirror, and how her stomach hurts and how her body hurts and, really, Safu just hates everything, in general, all the time, always

         —But Shion. He’s still good. He walks her home and covers for her in class, telling the teacher that her shoe accidentally slipped off and happened to hit the other student, as if that’s the sort of thing that actually happens. Shion is miraculously believed, although…it’s not that miraculous. It’s incredibly difficult to deny Shion anything; there’s something about him, some natural pull that draws people in.

         That evening, as Safu sets her now-single boot on the mat outside her door, she asks him why he helped her out. He just announces in his usual blunt, wonderful, way: “I feel like throwing things too, sometimes.”

         Safu laughs. The image of Shion, the boy with the world at his feet, losing his temper like she did is so ridiculous that most of her anger evaporates right off her. Shion’s eyes widen slightly, and for a moment she’s worried he’s bothered by her laugh, but he relaxes, offering her a little smile.

           “I haven’t seen you laugh like that before,” he says. There’s no real wonder in it. It’s little more than a slightly-above average statement of fact but…

         Safu wants to kiss him. On—on the cheek! Or forehead. Okay, perhaps all over his face.

        It’s a thrilling concept, and she finds herself momentarily overwhelmed. She realizes she is not speaking and hasn’t spoken when Shion sticks his hands in his pockets, less-than deftly picking up her conversational slack.

           “Well, goodnight,” he says.

           “Thank you,” Safu works in, practically on top of Shion’s goodbye. “For walking me home. I appreciate it.”

           “It’s no trouble.”

         He turns. 

           “Ah!” Safu bursts. She’s not really sure what she meant to say there, but Shion stops moving away and that’s the result she wanted so—good decision?

           “Ah?" 

           “Yes?” Safu asks. Shion tilts his head.

           “You said ‘Ah’! Did you need something else?”

         _Oh. Because I stopped him from leaving he wants something to do,_ Safu thinks. _It makes sense really. That is commonly why people stick together, because they’re united in a common goal or task._

           “I don’t have any tasks for you,” she announces.

           “Oh.”

         Safu smiles at him in a way that future mental revisits to this scene deem absolutely idiotic. “I will think of tasks in the future for us to do. If you are interested.”

           “Oh, okay. That sounds nice,” Shion acquiesces and Safu feels all the blood in her body head straight for her face. She was not aware that she could blush. What is actually wrong with her?

           “Well, I’m going to go then.” Shion says, mercifully.

           “Yes.”

He goes.

         Safu stands at her front porch a little longer than she has to watch him go. He doesn’t turn around and wave goodbye, doesn’t check to see if she’s still watching, even though she wishes he does. Shion moves steadily forward, and Safu finds her heartbeat calming and her face returning an appropriate temperature.

         _So this is puberty,_ she realizes. _I do not like this._  

         She takes a deep breath, dusts her skirt off, and decides to do her best to act around this strange burst of reproductive instinct.

Safu is 12.

         Shion doesn’t show up for class. The first day, she assumes he overslept; the second day, she assumes illness, and the third day she caves and visits his home to find it locked. On the fourth day, their teacher stands at the front of the class, and announces that Shion is no longer a part of the gifted curriculum and therefore was relocated to Lost Town.

         The class is quiet, but everyone seems to go along with it. Shion’s absence is taken as fact, he was there, he was nice enough, and now he’s gone.

         Something in Safu surges and she feels a little like crying, but she doesn’t understand why. Fleetingly, she thinks about talking through this feeling with one of her classmates; surely they feel similarly, it wasn’t as though Shion was friendless, he had plenty of people that knew him, and yet…she knows it wouldn’t work. None of these people really seem to _care_.

As if to confirm, Shion’s lab partner shrugs his shoulders and announces in an accepting voice, “Guess he couldn’t take the pressure.”

         Safu stands, and raises her textbook. Her face is hot and her heart beats in her ears, the loudest she’s ever heard it. The kid looks at her, alarmed. He hadn’t said anything to be ashamed of. He hadn’t said anything to warrant violence. Safu knows this. Her grip on the book tightens.

 _Are you going to throw it?_ A voice asks. _Who will stop you?_

         She sits down.

Safu is 13.

         She tries to return to her studies, tries to focus on the joys of neuroscience, which is turning out to be even more fascinating than she thought—but a niggling sense of disappointment replaces the initial elation. Without Shion to bounce ideas off of, victories feel, not hollow, but a little less victorious.

         She caves. She calls; he answers. Next thing she knows she’s on a train to visit his mother’s new bakery in Lost Town.

         Karan greets her with sweet rolls and fresh bread that’s tastier than any meal she’s had in months.

         Shion greets her with a smile and a new flavor of distance in his brown eyes.

         She smiles back, and longs to bridge it.

Safu is 14.

         Shion calls her his best friend, when a No.6 official asks if they are dating.

         She’s disappointed, but… there’s something about the word ‘best friend’ that fills her with a squirmy, tender joy.

         Shion is her best friend too. It’s nice to have that official, even if it isn’t the title she _really_ wants. 

Safu is 15.

         Shion looks out windows and works at the forest park. He says doesn’t love his job, but he does it well and has a good working friendship with the other man there, Yamase. They get coffee frequently, Shion likes his with a lot of cream but only a little sugar, though he’s been known to switch his preferred set-up on a whim. Safu’s trying to acquire a taste for black, but more often than not winds up sharing Shion’s concoction of the week.

         Their conversations are easy, amiable, any number of pleasing adjectives not worth listing. Safu is happy; or at least something like it. 

         Shion has not explained what happened three years prior, and for some reason it’s never the right time to ask.

         Perhaps it’s because the topic doesn’t come up in words, but in Shion’s body. There’s impatience in his fingers as he accepts his coffee; there’s a frustration, a dissatisfaction in his face when he’s with No. 6 officers that Safu’s never seen, or perhaps never recognized before. 

         He’s different. As always. He’s painfully, beautifully, different.

         He’s angry, and soft; polite and tactless, and Safu finds herself as attracted to his newly formed contradictions as she was to his perfect predictability.

         She wants to map everything thing about him that doesn’t make sense, and hang it on her wall to study. She wants to hold his hand and have him hold hers just a little tighter. She wants to kiss his lips and let him know that she’s here; that she’s always been here for this angry, hopelessly kind, boy. If only he’d let her be. 

Safu is 16.

         Safu tells him she wants his sperm for a baby, and after she successfully manages to pry her own foot out of her mouth—Shion runs off. The situation is strange enough to be comical, but somehow, nothing about it is. She tells herself she’s being dramatic but.

         It hurts.

         She knew it was a long shot to get him to return her affections; Shion is thick, painfully so.

         To have him run off like that, though, _that_ was unexpected. 

 _Nezumi,_ he had said.

         The word means nothing to her. She’s never had any particular issues with rodents, and neither has Shion, as far as she knows.

         That night, she sits in her comfiest pajamas, places her head between her legs and tries not to feel like the world is ending. She’ll call him later.

         Two years, he had said.

         She’ll wait. 

         They have time. 

Safu is 16.

         Shion’s in West Block; Shion doesn’t return her feelings, and Safu has to go after him. The three facts don’t necessarily align, but Safu’s marching forward anyway. Her grandmother is gone, her parents are gone, and she’ll be damned if she loses her best friend too.

         She loves him. 

         It isn’t something that she can just stop.

         So she doesn’t.

Safu is 16.

         Her brain is removed and put in a nutrient-filled glass tank that is approximately the width of a hula-hoop, and the height of an average apartment ceiling.

         Her thoughts are displayed as a series of green waves and printed papers from a machine attached to her tank.

         A scientist in a white lab coat talks to her like she’s something beautiful he made as he takes notes on a god she’s never heard of.

         More than anything, she thinks she’d like to see Shion.

         More than anything, she thinks she’d like to have this entire thing stop.

         She gets her wishes. Mostly.

         He has time.

         She doesn’t. 

Safu is still 16.

          Safu wonders if you take a person apart and reassemble them based on the data you’ve gathered through specific holidays, lonely hours, and birthdays if your interpretation of them would be accurate. Or helpful. Could she truly be a part of the life of this boy, no not a boy any more, who visits her grave so often?

Probably not.

She understands him in a way she never did before, which is something.

          He’s working himself to the bone. He talks to her about Nezumi more often than not, and she’s able to roughly piece together the personality of the boy who killed her and took Shion’s heart only to leave it behind. 

Nezumi’s an idiot, she decides. A broken, lonely, childish, powerful, idiot. 

It’s not a fair description, but Safu does what she can with the grudge. Anger is an easier emotion then despair— and for a ghost that can’t do anything but listen to her best friend sob, abandoned, at her gravesite— that’s probably the best feeling she’s got.

         Shion tells her he misses her.

         She misses him too.

Safu is still 16.

         He doesn’t cry anymore. Just looks at her grave quietly and asks for advice, as insecure, honest, and kind as he always has been.

         There’s a shadow that covers him however, something deep and dark and full of self-hate. He doesn’t like the person he’s becoming, doesn’t like that he’s relying too much on the memory of a man who’s gone.

         He misses her and misses her. He tells her stories about when they were together. She had no idea he remembered their conversations so vividly. She has never forgotten them either. She never will forget. It’s nice. Sometimes.

         Safu feels new longing. She misses living and breathing, and eating and sleeping— basic human things. More than anything she misses the little things like the feel of scratchy cotton under her fingers, and sweat. She misses not combing her hair and dealing with the tangles in the shower. She misses beds, and hugs, and her grandmother.

         She misses her parents, even though she never knew them.

         She misses the world.

         But she watches, as she always has.

Safu is still 16.

         After a while, he visits less often. 

         He’s busy, and she’s dead, and she understands, really.

         She worries.

         She figures that’s why she hasn’t moved on.

Safu is still 16.

         She’s starting to get bitter.

Shion complains about Tori, one of boys—no, men that work under him. He’s apparently quite the chatterbox, nervous and shuffling. He sounds pretty endearing but Shion just sounds annoyed with him; the sort of annoyance that’s been earned through countless disappointments. Shion complains that he’s not wising up about wiretaps—he’s too hopeful about the future, not planning to fail, too trusting about the whole committee. Too trusting in general. He’ll get hurt.

        “You’re probably laughing at me now, aren’t you? Worrying over such stupid things.” 

 _No Shion, I don’t feel much like laughing,_ Safu thinks.

Another problem with being dead—people always assume you’re saying the wrong thing.

         It’s frustrating. So frustrating.

         Sometimes, Safu thinks she’d like to yell at Shion.

Safu is still 16.

        Shion’s quiet today. He runs his hand through the ‘S’ of her name, and meticulously cleans the dirt and weeds from around her grave. He pays no attention to the soil that gets on his suit and cleans and cleans until her grave is spotless. When he’s done, he looks at his work, and shuts his eyes.

        “I’m sorry,” he says finally. For what, Safu isn’t sure, but she is certain that Shion is being honest. “Safu, I’m so sorry.”

        He breaks down; a quiet collapse. Tears track down his cheeks until he caves and buries his face in his muddy hands. He stains part of his hair brown, the color Safu remembers it being back when both of them were small, instead of just her. 

        “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he whispers. “But that’s no excuse not to move…is it?”

        He breathes in, deeply, the first deep breath Safu has seen him take in a while. 

        “I have to keep going. I have to do better. This…isn’t living, is it Safu? Mom says—…I need to stop working like this. I need to…be a person again.”

        He pats the top of her grave, and Safu almost thinks she can feel the caress. He is still for a long moment— Safu can’t be sure if minutes pass or hours— then slowly, slowly, he straightens up. He tries to smile, and it comes out a lopsided, broken thing, but it’s honest. More honest than it has been in the last year. 

        “I’m going to do better. I don’t know how. But…I’m going to try. For you, mom, Inukashi, Rikiga and.” Shion hesitates. “Nezumi too, wherever he is. I can’t keep living like this, for all of you.”

Shion blinks, scratches his chin with a muddy finger. His voice is tired, but there’s a warmth to it now, that was missing before.

        “Myself too. I should do this…for myself.”

It truly seems as if the thought hasn’t occurred to him until this moment. Safu forgets, briefly, that she can’t laugh. She’s proud of him.

Safu is still 16.

         They visit together. Shion’s usual happiness is elevated to the point where it’s actually obnoxious. Nezumi’s transformed from dangerously sleek panther to a grave, uncomfortably beautiful, in-law. His conversation is stilted, forced; and Safu has to put forth maximum effort to drudge up some modicum of fondness of him. It’s tough to see what Shion’s waited all these years for, and even more difficult to see past the mountain of hurt he’s caused.

The visit is pretty terrible, Safu admits.

 

         Nezumi returns alone later that night. He’s carrying flowers this time. He sets them down on the grass and sits there for a long moment, all stretched out, taking up as much space as possible; the true portrait of confidence.

         The wind gusts and he looks away just long enough to let out a sigh, which seems to deflate him. He pushes some hair out of his face and tugs his knees to his chest, like a child.

Safu wonders which version of Nezumi is the real one. Both, probably. It seems Shion managed to find someone just as contradictory as himself. Fitting.

         He doesn’t say anything, just sits there, hugging his legs. After a moment he rubs at his eyes and brushes through the letters on her grave, cleaning them. His touch is different from Shion’s, rougher, but more elegant.

           “I don’t like doing this,” he says. “Talking to graves. I’ve done it enough. I don’t even know if you can hear me.”

 _Then go,_ Safu thinks. Nezumi stops wiping off her grave.

           “But I have to talk to you.“ He opens his mouth to say something, but clamps it shut. He rubs his forehead aggressively. “I’m not looking for forgiveness, Safu. You shouldn’t give that to me. I set the bomb that killed you, after all.”

         _I asked you to._

         Nezumi is quiet for a long moment. He’s clearly got some sort of dialogue going through his head, but Safu can’t read it for the life of him. She wills him to speak, but he remains still and tense and…sadder than she remembers.

           “I know how dangerous it is to play with ‘what if’s’ is the thing,” Nezumi bursts out abruptly. His eyes harden. “It only causes more hurt. I’m not doing this.”

         It seems like the end of the conversation; Nezumi stands up to leave, even takes about three steps forward, moonlight briefly catching the pale skin of his face. He stops, shoulders slumping before turning on his heel and backtracking those same three steps to sit back down in the grass again. His voice is barely above a whisper.

           “I wish you could have been here with him, is the thing.”—he shakes his head— “No, no, I don’t. That’s just pushing this on you, dammit. He would have benefited from his best friend, you could have helped but I...I’m more selfish than that.”

Nezumi trails off, and Safu’s surprised by the pain on his face, the genuine vulnerability. He curses quietly, rubbing his face in his palm before mumbling, low and secret. “I wish _I_ could have been here with him.”

 _Then why’d you leave?_  

            “It wasn’t an option. To stay. It wasn’t an option. Staying in No.6, the city that killed my family, took everything—everything from me…To re-shackle myself to it as soon as the wall came down? Safu, it wasn’t even an option.”

_But this isn’t about the city, is it?_

         Nezumi smiles, a bitter conflicted thing, as if he just tasted something particularly awful. He shakes his head.

           “I’m full of shit, aren’t I?” He adjusts to flowers once. “Always running away from him.” He shuts his eyes, rests his forehead in his knee. The wind blows, and Nezumi is still. After a moment he stretches out, looks at the sky and then back at the grave. 

           “I don’t know what to do, but I have to keep moving, don’t I? Always have. Always will.”

He touches his lips, doesn’t seem to realize he does it. “But maybe not alone this time.”

           “Nezumi?”

          Safu knows this voice, and evidently so does Nezumi, considering the fact he seems to simultaneously tense and relax at the sound of it.

           “Your majesty. We’re of the same mind it seems.” 

Safu’s confused for a moment before she notices the flowers in Shion’s hands.

           “I just didn’t feel right. Our…conversation this morning felt so…”

          “Banal?” Nezumi offers.

           “Fake.” Shion corrects.

The wind blows between them as they look at the grave. Safu agrees, quietly.

           “I used to like to pretend she wasn’t…gone but I can’t get around that anymore.”

           “Why not?”

           “I’m not sixteen, anymore.”

Nezumi shuts his eyes. “You make a point.”

         Shion kneels, placing his flowers alongside Nezumi’s.

           “She would have changed the world.“

           “She did. She saved the whole city. Without her we wouldn’t have—”

           “I know.” Shion’s voice is harsher than Nezumi expects. “Is it wrong, that sometimes I think I’d rather have traded her life, for everything we made?”

           “No. “

           “I miss her.”

They stand by and quietly talk, to each other, and to Safu.

         After a moment, Nezumi begins to hum. In another moment, he begins to sing.

         He has a beautiful voice.

         Safu feels something in her begin to heal. 

Safu isn’t sure what she is.

         She doesn’t know what it means to be a ghost, or a memory, or a grave, or sixteen or one.

         She doesn’t know what to do with the afterlife anymore than her life, but…she’s starting to understand, piece by piece—that this isn’t what she wants.

         She thinks of her first and only love’s quiet laughter.

         She thinks of his companion’s quiet singing voice.

         They’ll be fine.

         She thinks of the world she loves, and what may come and what has passed.

         She wants more.

         So she thinks of what she should do next.

         She’s afraid but she knows what she has to do.

         She moves on.


End file.
